Government to share cost of landmark Belgian trial

The Rwandan cabinet has decided to meet some of the costs involved in the trial of four Rwandans convicted in a Belgian court in June of war crimes committed during the 1994 Rwanda genocide in the town of Sovu, Butare province, the official Rwandan News Agency (RNA) reported on Thursday. The government would share part of the costs incurred by witnesses and prosecutors travelling to and from Brussels, it said. The four convicts, including two nuns, were on 8 June sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from 12 to 20 years by the Brussels ‘Cour d’Assises’ (Crown Court) in Belgium. The ground-breaking trial was the first ever in which a country judged war crimes and human rights violations committed by foreigners on foreign soil. Belgium passed a law in 1993 giving Belgian courts jurisdiction over violations of the Geneva conventions on war crimes no matter where the crimes were committed. The groups that sent witnesses to Brussels included, among others: Justice sans frontiers, IBUKA (the association of genocide survivors) and AVEGA (the association of genocide widows), according to an official of the Ministry of Justice, Albert Basongera, cited by RNA. “The witnesses asked the Government of Rwanda to meet part of the costs, amouting to more than one million Belgian Francs [almost US $22,000], used mostly in transporting the witnesses to Brussels, and their maintainance,” Basongera said. At the trial, Alphonse Higaniro, 52, a former minister and director of a match factory, received the longest sentence of 20 years’ imprisonment. \ Vincent Ntezimana, 39, a former professor at Butare university, received 12 years; and the two nuns Consolata Mukangango, 42, and Julienne Mukabutera, 36, known as sisters Gertrude and Maria Kisito, from the Benedictine convent in Sovu, received 15 and 12 years’ imprisonment respectively. All four originate from Butare in southern Rwanda where their crimes were committed, and had been living in Belgium since the 1994 genocide in which at least 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered.